Tag Archives: Food

It was a beautiful autumn Friday in New England. My daughter had just completed two successful, confidence-inspiring hours of gymnastics at the Little Gym. (In a blue shiny leotard we had just purchased, nonetheless!) We walked back to the car, hand-in-hand; I was proud of this time. She was a baby who had low muscle tone, and I had put her in gymnastics purposefully. Now, she was doing flips over the bars.

As I unlocked the car, Fiona started to gaze off into the distance. Stare, in fact. I followed her gaze to her classmate and parents, who were walking together.

A slow smirk spread over her face, as her gaze focused on the obese father.

“Mama, he’s fat.” She continued smirking, and an implied sense of power washed over her as she realized she was NOT and he WAS.

Not my daughter.

******

For those of you who don’t know, I was a FAT kid. I was mocked for it by classmates, I was deemed “disgusting”, I was even sexually assaulted by a classmate in music class “because I was fat.” (Because I deserved it, because I was fat.)

There are people who will view this who will argue with me and say that there’s no negative connotation with being fat. They will tell me that I’m too sensitive and that I put too many expectations on my daughter and I say to them, I AM DONE WITH YOU.

I LIVED it and I continue to live it every time I lose 5 pounds and I am praised for it. I continue to live it every time I gain weight and I notice people give me less compliments about my appearance. You are bullshitting yourself if you think there is no negative connotation with being fat. There is less today, but it still exists.

When Fiona uttered this sentence, I panicked. Where did she pick this up? I, for one, don’t use the word fat. I use the word heavy and overweight, but not fat, because I know what it carries with it. We also refer to foods as being healthy, or having “vitamins to make you run fast”. Had she picked it up from her friends? Seen it on an ad? I was a little stunned, and a little disgusted, even know the intellectual side of me knew she was four years old. She reminded me of that blonde in my class on the playground who always made fun of my awkward body during Project Adventure.

“Fiona, we do not say that. That is not nice. Get in the car.”

I buckled her up, prayed, and said to myself – Do not be hard on her. Do not project your experience on her and shame her. Just be honest, factual, and tell her your experience.

“Fiona, I have to tell you a story.”

“What?”

“A long time ago, Mama was overweight when she was a kid. A lot of people made fun of Mama and called her fat and it made Mama feel really, really bad. So I know how it feels, and it doesn’t feel good. That’s why we don’t call people fat.”

I don’t know if was blood memory, or a sudden lightbulb that went off in her head, but Fiona’s face turned ashen. Her face crumpled, and she GOT IT. Like, mourned for her mother got it. Like, cried all the way home got it. I immediately felt horrid, even know I know I maintained an even tone (isn’t this motherhood thing fucked?)

On the way home, she turned her face into the seat, ashamed. I tried to reiterate my unconditional love for her. “Baby, Mama doesn’t think any differently of you – Mama would love you even if you punched somebody! It’s just important we’re kind to people.” It didn’t seem to help. She whimpered and finally started to come around after I distracted her with a joke.

*****

Parenthood is brutal. It’s even more brutal with a trauma history you have to dissect and not project onto your kids whilst maintaining some sort of a lesson for them when they’re unkind. Childhood is brutal too – imagine not knowing you were being unkind, and then being told you were being unkind in a way that hurt your parent when they were kids? Imagine being so innocent and then not, knowing your Mama was hurt for the way she looked? And would that happen to you?

Yesterday, someone on my husband’s facebook feed disagreed with the meme that Donald Trump’s words about sexual assault leading to the actual crime did not matter, and that words are very different from actions. I sit here enraged, thinking about that, because I know the effect of words. Words that lead to sexual assault. “FAT” leading to “less than” leading to “it’s ok to touch her in a sexual way because she’s less than”.

Today it was painful to be alive. Every fiber of my being was uncomfortable; I couldn’t stand the weight of my body today. It hung on me. I felt it in my jeans and felt every bite in my stomach. If you think I’m being dramatic, I’m not; this is how I experience things sometimes, as someone in recovery from an eating disorder. Ask someone else you know who’s in recovery from one.

I have days like this. Bad days. Days when I envision myself swinging into a binge cycle again. Days when I envision swinging into a restrictive cycle as a result of the aforementioned binge cycle. And I went into recovery ten (!!) years ago. Sad and destructive? Hardly. Realistic, I think. Given the other comorbid diagnoses I’ve dealt with.

I’ve talked about the “once you’ve recovered, you’ve recovered!” camp for a long time. The people who claimed they had a “lightbulb” moment and never turned back, never put their body down again, never consulted with ED once more. OK, being a bit (a bit) more humble now, I’ll bite (no pun intended): I bet there are a select few who’ve had this experience. Perhaps the same amount who’ve married someone they’ve never fought with, or who had a mind-numbing spiritual experience and never craved a drink again. But for most of us bozos on the bus, I just don’t think it’s that simple.

(Speaking of that, I really wanted to drink today. But I didn’t. Whoop de frickin da.)

For most of us, we wake up and don’t have time to meditate for twenty perfect minutes, and no, we weren’t going to wake up twenty minutes earlier, because we were up tossing and turning/up with our kids and needed that extra 20. For most of us, we’re shot out of a cannon when our kid peels our eyelids open with their fingers/when our cat meows in our face. We then head downstairs to find cat puke right in front of the bathroom doorway, and in between reaching for the bathroom cleaner, silently bemoan the fact that we still owe 25,000 in student loans and will never be able to afford a house – now, now we are judging ourselves for not being mindful and worrying senselessly, and our daughter is yelling for the TV to be turned on, that ever-destructive-causer-of-doom TV, and we’re reminding her to use her manners. And that’s only the first 5 minutes.

That is how most of us go through our day. Well, you’ll have to excuse me. That’s how I go through it; I can’t speak for all of you.

That’s why, when I hear people speak of “never turning back” on recovery and being “free of ED”, I am skeptical. Did never turning back account for those six weeks post-birth when you couldn’t exercise because your body was healing and your mind when nuts because of it? No, it didn’t. And did being “free of ED” chide you relentlessly when you decided to restrict your eating when your father died because it was the only way you could cope? Yes, it did, because wasn’t I supposed to do this recovery thing perfectly? And here I was, nine years in, having a small relapse?

Being perfect at recovery doesn’t work for me because being perfect was the essence of my life-killing eating disorder.

It’s important that I can screw up at this thing, and know that it’s still ok. That it doesn’t mean this time I lose my job because I’m too weak; that it just means I go to more meetings and therapy. I think, unfortunately, this is a chronic disease, and that’s not marketable in the field of recovery. It’s not marketable to say, “You’re going to deal with a little of this for the rest of your life.” But that’s how addiction is. You have to keep an eye on it. It’s always in wait.

And keeping an eye on myself everyday? Is that a tedious thing? No, it’s actually a beautiful, heartbreaking and staggering undertaking that has only served to better me as a person. I’ve heard people in self-help meetings claim they are grateful for their addiction, and I jive with that. The things I’ve discovered about myself due to this journey. And, I think it’s really healthy and humble when one can name all the parts of themselves. The addict, the fighter, the daughter, the singer, the crier, the writer. To dismiss one part of yourself, even a dark part, would be doing a disservice to yourself.

Don’t get me wrong; I hope to God I wake up tomorrow and magically have the hypomanic get-up-and-go that I usually have; I hope I go for a run and get those wonderful ol’ endorphins rushing. I wish I could have someone else’s brain. But I don’t. I have an eating disorder and I can’t drink and I have depression. The grace in all of this, the marker that tells me that I’m growing, is that I now know this too shall pass. I didn’t always know that. And that’s a gift that didn’t magically appear to me one day. It came to me after years of hard work on myself that really wasn’t all that simple.

So, I’m a little late to the game. Apparently, for a few years now, some schools have been including a BMI (Body Mass Index) score on children’s report cards. In 2011, The Huffington Post reports that BMI scores are “the latest weapon in the fight against the growing obesity epidemic in children”. I’m sure you can already guess my reaction to this, but before I get into the more objective reasons, I’ll include a little personal history.

You all know I was an overweight kid. An overweight kid who carried a lot of shame about both her body and imperfections. Those imperfections included my less-than-stellar grades in math. Report cards, a necessary evil, filled me with anxiety and dread every quarter. Why? I knew, deep down, that I wasn’t a perfect student; I occasionally turned in homework late and periodically made careless mistakes on tests. I held a deep level of shame due to these peccadilloes – I feared I was a bad person because of it. I feared my parents’ reaction to it and hated myself around report card time. “I should be doing better”, I would mutter to myself.

Can you imagine the amount of shame I would have had if BMI’s were added back in the 90’s? Can you imagine the ridicule I would have gotten from fellow students? Can you imagine the reaction from “trusted adults”?

Let doctors and nutritionist do their jobs, and let teachers do theirs. Is it important that we model a healthy lifestyle for children in our schools? Absolutely. Teaching them to obsess about a number is not modelling a healthy lifestyle. Especially when schools continue to pack their vending machines with candy bars and less-than-healthy foods. Hello, mixed messages? More importantly, who are the people who are trained to deal with an individual’s weight, activity and nutrition level? Their PCP. Their PCP can do a much more thorough job of determining whether or not a child is healthy or unhealthy. Better than an index number. And better than an untrained teacher or administrative personnel who is transmitting this information to a child. (I’m not knocking teachers, I just think it’s clear kids’ personal doctors are probably better equipped to assess that stuff.)

BMI’s can trigger, but not cause, an eating disorder. I’m a firm believer that a multitude of factors need to be in place to cause an eating disorder. But, an environmental trigger like a BMI report card can trigger a child who is already predisposed to having one. Kids at school are already influenced by bullies at school telling them they need to weigh less, wear better clothes, or don more makeup. But if adults told them this? We may forget adults in our lives wielded an unusual amount of power, power that has the ability to influence us for decades and haunt us. Some kids may not care two ways to Sunday if a trusted adult in their life tells them they’re fat. But a vulnerable child? A child who comes from a traumatic home or has low self-esteem to boot? They’ll take that as truth, and they’ll run with it. People vulnerable to eating disorders tend to be people-pleasers, and if someone tells them to lose weight, they’ll do it. I personally know someone who has been triggered by BMI report cards. This is no joke.

BMI’s are not the most accurate predictor of fat mass. In general, can it tell you if you need to lose weight? Probably, I’m not a doctor. But there are other scales – two are Body Fat Mass and Percentage of Body Fat. It’s completely possible to have an obese BMI and a normal or overweight score for BFM or PBF. I’ve also known people who weight train, lose inches from their waist, and watch their BMI scores rise. Go Kaleo talks a LOT about this (she’s a WARRIOR, check out her blog/fb page). And, here you can see how she’s clinically overweight by current indexes. Ridiculousness.

BMI scores are not going to change a perpetually unhealthy household. I’m guessing that national health advocates are hoping that BMI scores will “wake up” parents who don’t keep a good eye on their child’s nutrition. As in, maybe they’ll change their family food habits if they see their kid weighs too much. Mmmmkay. I believe this might work for a total of two weeks. Why the cynicism, you ask? Well, I’m going to take a wild guess and say that the majority of households who constantly feed their kids donuts, soda and McDonalds may not have access to food that is healthier and therefore, higher-priced. So, there’s financial blocks, and there’s mental blocks too. I’m going to go a step farther – which may get me in trouble here – and posit that these same families may not be in the best place mentally or spiritually. And the solution to this is not a number on a report card. It’s a change in family communication patterns or beliefs. You don’t work from the outside in and put a band-aid on it; you treat the actual wound. Bottom line, NUMBERS NEVER HELP PEOPLE TO LOSE WEIGHT OR CHANGE LIFESTYLE BELIEFS.

Isn’t the medical profession’s oath “Do No Harm”? I can’t take credit for this one. A couple of weeks ago, on Good Morning America, one of their medical correspondents “weighed in” on this subject. GMA had interviewed several teenage girls who had communicated that the BMI scores ultimately made them feel bad about themselves. The reporting medical correspondent insightfully noted the medical profession’s possible betrayal of its oath. If GMA’s small-scale interview translates to the rest of the teenage population, then harm is being done.

Is obesity healthy? No way. But neither are eating disorders. Our nation has missed the mark and swung the opposite way with food obsession. We uselessly obsess about gluten and sugar and numbers. And I’ve harassed you all before about the dangers of obsessing about food and numbers. Obsession about numbers = obesssion about outside appearance = not solving your food issues. But working from the inside out works every time. Building your child’s self-esteem through encouragement of esteemable tasks? Works. And modelling a balanced diet and positive self-esteem will protect your children from any imbalance. But an index number? No way.

And I was thrown a surprise (well, not-so-surprise-since-I-snooped-through-his-phone) party by my boyfriend. What a lucky gal am I!

And, respecting my introvert limits, my bf invited a small, intimate group of people, including my parents and brother. It was perfect, but can I tell you? I still have trouble tolerating attention on ME. Being a long-time caretaker, I have no trouble lavishing attention and care on others. However, when it comes to me, it seems too indulgent and undeserving. Inaccurate, isn’t it? But it also reminds me of my old anorexic voice. “Take up less space!” “You don’t need anything!” Which, of course, is so unhealthy. So I gritted my teeth and accepted the best of the best of friends’ praise and presents.

So, I usually hate posting food, but I wanted to document the awesome spread that we had:

We had some raw veggies and veggie dip courtesy of a Pickety Place veggie dip mix:

…And some delicious pumpernickel bread and dill dip which is a family recipe of my bf’s. Yes, I eat bread. It’s ok to eat bread:

Plus, some amazing salsa-and-cheese Mexican dip:

And let me go back to the amazing friends I have. My best friend, Cory Norbutus, is the creator of Heart Healthy Tips. I love her website and lifestyle because it encourages a balance of indulgence and activity. She is a personal trainer who believes in both indulging in Chinese food AND doing a ton of burpees in the middle of a 3 mile walk. We met at UMass in 2000 freshman year, and the rest is history. I’d like to think our lifestyles complement each other. Here is the two of us on my birthday:

I think, per usual, the challenge for me that day lay in a. sitting with being full, and b. not taking care of others and enjoying my day! Why is it so hard for some of us to accept love and praise? For me, the whole role of perfectionism in anorexia lies underneath this issue. For example – if I’m imperfect and make mistakes, then I don’t deserve love at all. Which is so. innaccurate. In fact, I believe it’s a cognitive distortion called all-or-nothing thinking. As I spoke about in a previous entry, we are all human and mess up from time to time. It doesn’t mean we don’t deserve love.

We deserve it just because we exist.

I will leave you with this beautiful bouquet of flowers I was given – perfect red roses and gladiolas, my favorite flower (and incidentally, August’s flower).

Do you have trouble accepting love and praise? What about it is hard for you to embrace?

PS: The only shot I got of my birthday cake was messy, so that’s why you don’t see some cake up on this entry.

I wish this article was about my anorexia going on a permanent vacation, but it isn’t. There aren’t two ways about it: recovery is hard on any average routine-filled day. So when you throw in a two-week period of little sleep, constant activity, and strange, indulgent foods, one in recovery can feel like he or she is on an anorectic rollercoaster.

I went to Los Angeles for almost two weeks, to introduce my daughter to friends she hadn’t the opportunity to meet yet. (Oh, and I forgot to mention above the fun of putting a Boston toddler on Los Angeles time. Joyful 3am awakenings where SuperWhy MUST be watched. But I digress.) Now, I love LA for many reasons – it’s beautiful, the weather is almost perfect, the people are relaxed, and I’ll admit, it’s pretty cool to see celebrities alongside of you shopping for groceries. But it’s image-obsessed. Two years ago, I had gone to LA, and when I got off the plane at LAX with a dream and my cardigan…wait…

No but really. The first billboard I saw read:

“1-800-GET-SKINNY”.

I remember thinking how you’d never see that in Boston.

Also, the last time I went, I had gone out to a bar with my boyfriend and some of his friends. I had excused myself to go to the bathroom, and when I entered it, immediately felt out of place. The white hippie sundress and sandals I had previously thought were pretty attractive paled in comparison to the row of stiletto heels and skintight dresses I saw on the other women. Now, I’ve never been one to follow trends, but I had to admit that my Boston-ness seemed glaringly apparent that day.

This time, I didn’t compare myself as much to other women, but I found the off-schedule eating pretty abhorrent. Can you eat healthy on vacation? Absolutely. Is it harder when you’re dealing with low finances and a screaming toddler? Yup. So, long story short, I found myself eating more fast foods and sugar, and while you know I DEFINITELY don’t endorse abstinence from any of these foods, it was an imbalance for me.

The above picture was taken in this fabulous candy store, Dylan’s Candy Bar, in the Grove. Think candy you haven’t seen for years AND a chocolate fondue bar where you could dip strawberries and rice krispie treats in chocolate. This is me, overenjoying one of those delectable treats:

The folly for me always lies in this common anorexic miscalculation: linking food intake with moral value. Because I ate a ton of candy that day, I was immediately a disgusting person…not. I may have had uncomfortable feelings of my body breaking down sugars it doesn’t usually, but that doesn’t translate into my moral value. Separating the physical and the emotional are so very important, at times. And also…one can’t maintain a perfect food intake 24/7. We are humans, which means we err. Which means it’s ok to get off the bandwagon for a bit if we know we have the ability to get back on safely. And at this point, I do. I just need to remind myself it’s ok to indulge in healthy substances. Writing, friend time, nerds ropes, and my daughter.

I will say this trip was not a total anorectic mental slip, and is documented by the following: I wore a bikini with little to no shame, for the first time in my life.

I had planned this photo mentally, because I needed to challenge the irrational idea in my head that I looked disgusting in a bathing suit and needed to hide my body. For some, this might be triggering, but for me, it was one of the most liberating experiences I ever had. Truthfully, I’ve still found ways to pick apart this photo since then, but, it’s a work in process, isn’t it?

How does being on vacation affect your self-care? Does it improve it or throw it off?

A BIG thanks goes out to Liz for sending me this posting by Nate Milsham. Nate writes about the difficulty, pain and triumphs one experiences when trying to support someone with an eating disorder. (I’ll go on record and say it’s one of the most difficult disorders to support.) His wife has been battling ED-NOS for years, and in this post he details his sensitive observations of her and the how the outside world treats women.

Well yes, they are. And you are contributing to many a woman’s death, on a daily basis, all for your love of money.

Stop trying to kill my sisters. Or my daughter, for that matter.

What if you, instead, chose to publish an un-airbrushed, average looking lady on your cover? Might that young pre-teen you’re selling to have not chosen to go on a 500-calorie a day diet? Maybe, maybe not. Even if you’re not the direct cause, you’re part of the equation.

And when the women who don’t kill themselves via starvation give up on attaining that perfect ideal, they swing the other way. They start binging, because they just as well might give up and “get fat because there’s no hope for me anyway.” You may have heard of an epidemic called “obesity.” You play a part in that.

They buy into your bullshit because you’ve inundated them with false truths since the moment they were born. Society’s values do a number on them too – “sweet, cute, Daddy’s little girl.” Pushed down by the patriarchy as soon as they can breathe air.

Oh, and stop trying to kill our mothers.

The other day, I heard a husband joke about giving his wife 6 months post-partum to appear as if she never had a baby. Behind the joking that made me want to stick a needle in my eye – there is truth. A million of your articles have been dedicated to women pretending as if they never took part in assisting the human race in surviving. Makes sense.

Keeping women insecure earns a lot of money for you. How do you sleep at night? How do you live with yourself?

Either way, it’s got to stop. You make my new-mother friend feel like she should weigh less, you make my daughter the subject of weight stereotypes, and you make me feel like my genetic spider veins are little spindles of evil on my pasty-white, untanned-and-therefore-unappealing skin.

STOP.

(Another Piece of Cake realizes there are healthy ad campaigns out there, and applauds them! Another Piece of Cake also realizes men are hit hard by the media too, but Another Piece of Cake only writes about women because she’s, well…a woman.)

This week’s link comes to us from Pam G, a friend from college who is a caring Mom of three (one older son and twin boys – she’s my hero!) The article is written by Stefanie Wilder-Taylor, who has a TV show and books and other fabulous stuff. It’s called Please Don’t Talk About Your Weight In Front of My Daughters,and in it she writes about the importance of adults NOT putting their own bodies down in front of kids.

Why?

Kids do what we do, not what we say. So even if you tell them they’re gorgeous and breathtaking, they’re still probably going to have bad body image if you talk shit about your abs 24/7.

What I’m about to say goes against all advice given in any self-help meeting, but it’s how I feel, damnit.

I have often felt different than most, not a part of, less than.

Not always. Sometimes, I feel on top of the world, totally present, and I love everything in my life. And sometimes, I feel just like every other “bozo on the bus”, another nameless face in the crowd, which is honestly ok. But often, I feel…different.

Why?

Well, let’s pick apart the seventy different kinds of recovery I’m in. I can’t diet, I can’t drink in safety (in the words of Biggie, if you don’t know, now you know) and my therapist has diagnosed me with depression (that requires medication) and some trauma stuff for a long time now. Let’s say this: if you were a clinician, and you saw my rap sheet, you might wince a bit and say, “Jeez.” You might expect me to be doin’ a lot worse than I am now.

Cause I am doing pretty damn well for the “stuff” I have. I got my master’s degree, am successful in a field where I can turn my misery into someone else’s avoidance of said misery, and have a family of my own. I am fairly high-functioning; I am lucky. Or resilient.

But there’s something funny about high-functioning anything-ers: they can slip more easily between the cracks. They, in turn, can feel more different, because they mingle with the “normies” of society. At work functions, at family parties, at friend’s BBQs. They can be around people who drink or diet or binge or don’t experience the glory of mood swings, but it doesn’t make it any less hard. In fact, it can be a particular kind of hard because they’re often the sole “different kid” in a group of “normies”.

So that’s why I feel different.

Self-help groups tell you to identify as just another worker among workers, which helps sometimes. I’ll often use this example: I have a friend who is allergic to basically any kind of food. So, I try to remind myself, “Wow. She must feel the same way – like everyone is staring at her when she orders her food. Maybe she feels different than, too.”

(And I do realize there is no normal. And I do realize everybody’s got their thing.)

But I do think it can seem overwhelming to an individual when they realize –

“Hey! I need an everything-anonymous!”

Fun.

How do YOU feel different? Is there something that sets you apart from the crowd?

The idea that all of our bodies have their unique set point, a number, give or take 5-10 lbs, that our body likes to reside at when it’s healthy and we’re feeding it well.

One of the biggest breakthroughs I experienced in my ED recovery was accepting my set point.

(Which is a tall order, I do realize. Acceptance can be a bit of a bitch to work through)

And my set point is pretty average. Coming from a family of Irish-German “Campbell Soup Kids”, I realized I was never going to be 110 lbs soaking wet (sorry for the rare number), once I was able to see through the irrationalities of my eating disorder. It just wasn’t going to happen, unless I engaged in superhuman exercise and dangerous restriction every day. Which, was alarming to my ED at first. My ED wanted to fight my body. Screw you, it said to my body. I’ll show you. You can be different.

However, once I accepted it, set point theory was…relaxing, actually. It comforted me, because if I fed my body the way my nutritionist told me to, it would never screw me over. It would never put me at an obese weight I feared…it would put me right where I belong.

(But there was quite a fight to get to that acceptance. Think: A crying, binging sometimes, scratching, screaming fight.)

I still have to check myself fairly daily on this when my ED starts luring me into lesser-weight land.

What do you think? Have you accepted your body type, your set point? If not, what steps do you have to take to obtain that acceptance?

Meta

My mother, who is compassionate to a fault and takes care of all living things, even the insects, complains when I don’t tolerate family gossiping about me because she is more committed to order than justice. She wishes I would try harder with people who have told me I never should have been a mother. […]